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The SolarWinds Orion Installer is an all-in-one application for installations and upgrades. You use one installer to install or upgrade multiple Orion Platform products and install or upgrade Additional Polling Engines, Additional Web Servers, and High Availability Servers.

This guide walks you through upgrading only your NTA product. We include checklists to prepare and complete your upgrades, gotchas, and troubleshooting steps. This guide includes information on upgrading with SolarWinds High Availability (HA).

Review your current product licenses and determine if you need to make any changes. You can download any updated license keys for your upgrade through your Customer Portal. Verify any license upgrades and needs with your SolarWinds account manager or contact SolarWinds.

Do you need to migrate?

You may need to migrate products and databases to new dedicated servers or to shared servers. Check if you need to migrate by reviewing new requirements, your products, and your current environment.

Migrating adds time to your upgrade, but you have the best opportunity to update to new servers during an upgrade.

Gather credentials

Make sure you have all account credentials, SQL database credentials, your SolarWinds account, and local admin server credentials.

Build your upgrade path

Use the SolarWinds Orion Installer to build your upgrade path. Even with older product versions, you can use the Orion Installer to build a detailed, accurate upgrade path.

The Product Upgrade Advisor is still available, but it does not include all product versions. For this reason, SolarWinds recommends using the Orion installer.

Run all Windows updates

Before upgrading, check for and run all Microsoft Windows Updates on your main polling engine, all additional polling engines, and all additional web servers. As you upgrade, if a Windows update runs, your system may reboot as needed by Windows.

Schedule the upgrade

Set up the maintenance window, preferably off-peak hours. Depending on the number of products, size of database(s), and size of environment, you may need hours to complete your upgrade.

Upgrades will require polling engines and SolarWinds services to be offline for a length of time, causing you to lose a portion of polling data.

Notify your company

Send a message to your company of the upgrade schedule and maintenance window. If you need additional help, contact and allocate specific staff to be available.

How long does an upgrade take?

The time it takes to complete an upgrade depends on:

Hardware

Database server performance and database size

Number of additional polling engines

Number of additional web servers

Environment performance

Number of modules being upgraded

Number of devices being polled

Since every configuration is different, we cannot predict exactly how long your upgrade will take. Through this guide, we include steps and tips to help reduce time for your upgrade.

Gotchas you should review

When upgrading to NTA 4.2.3, if you added a site binding to a hostname before you upgrade, you must bind the Orion Web Console to a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). See this article.

When upgrading to NTA 4.2.3 with custom menus, you can not see the Performance Dashboard link in the menu. For details, see this article.

After NTA 4.2.2, future releases will no longer support Windows OS 2008 and 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. SolarWinds recommends that you upgrade to Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, or 2016 at your earliest convenience. For more information, see End of support notices.

If you have edited resource properties, the All Groups resource may be empty after upgrading to NTA 4.2.

When upgrading to NTA 4.2, using the group by feature for custom properties may return no results, and the data loading may hang or not complete. All regular functionality is unaffected by the issue.

General Orion Platform gotchas

Orion Platform 2018.4 products are no longer compatible with any version of SQL Server 2012.

If you wrote your own code, by changing SolarWinds .css files or adding .js files, or were directed to make changes by SolarWinds Support, the code may be overwritten during the upgrade. See Upgrading if you have custom code.

Always check that you have enough hard drive space for zipped and unzipped installers. One unzipped installer can consume several GBs of space.

During your upgrade, use the Scalability Engine Installer. If you use downloaded installers or the installer bundle, you must install one product and version at a time. The versions must match between the main and additional polling engines or you will receive a Database Configuration Failure Error.

If upgrading from a very early or End of Life SolarWinds product version, you may want to install a new product instead of performing an upgrade or migrating data. SolarWinds Support can provide the best advice for these upgrade scenarios.

If you enabled SolarWinds High Availability, you must disable High Availability before you can upgrade. You must have the same versions of SolarWinds products on your primary and secondary servers before you can re-enable your HA pools. See Upgrade with HA.

Prepare your environment to upgrade

When you are ready to upgrade, complete these steps. They include the common actions you need to complete before upgrading products.

If you have a test or staging environment, we highly recommend testing the upgrade first. You cannot roll back an installation once completed.

1. Back up the DB

Snapshot your VMs

Back up your SolarWinds SQL database. If you need help, please check your vendor's site for documentation and instructions.

If you have your database on a VM, create a snapshot or copy of your VM.

You cannot roll back an upgrade. Always create a database backup.

2. Back up custom code (Optional)

(Optional) Back up your custom code. When upgrading, any custom additions or changes to the interface will be saved over.

3. Back up Report Writer reports (Optional)

Upgrading to an Orion Platform 2016.1 or later product? You can skip this step.

If you use Report Writer reports (NPM 10.5 and earlier) or still have legacy reports, back up the reports folder to save your custom reports:

Upgrade Path notes

SolarWinds recommends always using the SolarWinds Orion Installer to build your upgrade path. Be advised, not all NTA versions can directly upgrade to the latest version and may require running multiple upgrades from one version to the next. For environments with multiple Orion products, you may also need to upgrade multiple products version to version.

NTA 4.2.3 requires you upgrade to NPM 12.2 before upgrading.

NPM 12.2 supports NTA 4.2.2 and 4.2.3.

NPM 12.1 supports NTA 3.11, 4.2, 4.2.1, and 4.2.2.

NTA 4.2.3 supports direct upgrades from 4.2, 4.2.1., and 4.2.2.

NTA 4.2.2 supports direct upgrades from 3.11, 4.2, and 4.2.1. Version 4.1.2 is not supported to directly upgrade to 4.2.2.

NTA 4.1.2 can be directly upgraded only to NTA 4.2 and 4.2.1. When generating your upgrade path, you will upgrade NTA 4.1.2 to 4.2.1 (the highest supported version for NPM 12.0.1), upgrade NPM 12.0.1 to 12.2, and finally NTA 4.2.1 to 4.2.3.

Upgrade with SolarWinds HA

To upgrade a server pair in a SolarWinds High Availability (HA) pool, follow the instructions for upgrading your product with the following differences.

If you enabled SolarWinds High Availability, you must disable HA before you can upgrade. All SolarWinds product versions must match on the primary and secondary servers before you can re-enable your HA pools.

These instructions assume you have an HA pool already created and enabled.

1. Disable the HA pool

The HA pool must be disabled to begin upgrading. If you upgrade prior to disabling, the pool is automatically disabled.

Each Additional Web Server: Download and run the Additional Web Server installer, and run the Configuration wizard.

During an additional web server upgrade, you can point users to the website of the main polling engine, or to any web server that is already upgraded.

After installing this product and version on your entire environment, check the product and version as done on your downloaded Upgrade Path PDF or list. If you have additional versions to install, repeat this step.

2. Upgrade NTA using the SolarWinds Orion Installer

Starting with version 4.2.2, SolarWinds NTA is available for installation through the new SolarWinds Orion Installer. To learn more about upgrading with the installer, see this article.

The Orion Installer generates and builds the upgrade path for you, directing the entire upgrade process. When you run the installer, it detects your installed Orion products and versions, verifies the latest available product versions available per your maintenance agreement, and builds the upgrade path for you.

While you can still use the Upgrade Product Advisor to see what your upgrade path may look like, we recommend always using the Orion Installer upgrade path.

When you upgrade an existing NTA installation with the NTA Flow Storage Database installed on a remote server, using the SolarWinds Orion Installer, Orion Installer cannot upgrade the remote Flow Storage Database. You must upgrade the remote NTA Flow Storage Database manually, using the stand-alone installer.

The Orion Installer shows a warning message if you upgrade the Main Poller before upgrading the remote NTA Flow Storage Database. For more information, see this article.

Steps for upgrading from NTA 4.2.2 and earlier with a remote NTA Flow Storage Database:

Use the stand-alone installer to upgrade the remote NTA Flow Storage Database.

Run the SolarWinds Orion Installer to upgrade NPM and NTA in one installation process.

Use the Orion Scalability Engines Installer to upgrade Additional Pollers, Additional Websites and High Availability (HA).

3. Upgrade Orion Agents

If you have the Global Agent Setting to Allow automatic updates (enabled by default), the Orion Agents automatically upgrade in the background. Agents are tied to their release version. You can skip manually upgrading agents if the option is enabled.

The upgrades take a bit of time to complete, but will not require any actions. Agents update at a throttled number of 10 to limit the impact on the polling engine. As soon as one agent completes upgrading, another agent takes its place so there are always 10 active threads until all agents are upgraded.

Select all agents needing updates and click More Actions > Update. The agents upgrade in the background.

You can enable the option through Settings > All Settings > Agent Settings and click Define Global Agent Settings.

4. Start the engines

Start services in the Orion Service Manager on the main polling engine, all additional polling engines, and all web servers.

5. Re-enable alert actions

Go to Alerts & Activity.

Click More.

De-select Pause actions of all alerts.

If you have alerts configured to notify you when certain entities haven't been polled for "X" number of minutes or similar, ensure that you have waited for at least two polling intervals before re-enabling alert actions so that polling has caught completely up, which prevents false alerts.

After the upgrade check your system

All product versions should be installed properly. Open the application and verify the versions displayed in the footer of the Web Console. Try current and new features with your system to check performance and expected functionality. If you run into issues, check the troubleshooting tips.

Troubleshooting

If you receive errors, try the following:

If you experience issues and are not on the latest product versions, we recommend completing a full upgrade. Use the SolarWinds Orion Installer to create the upgrade path. Many of these updates solve issues you may experience part way through your upgrade.

Check our Success Center for troubleshooting. We recommend searching the name of the product, the version number, any error codes or messages displayed, and the general issue you found.

If you receive a (500) internal server error after an upgrade, use the Orion permission checker to make sure your Group Policy is not locked. See this article for full details.

If your views do not load when first opening the console, run the Configuration Wizard again.

If an issue occurs you need additional help with, contact Support. We recommend gathering diagnostics, a screenshot of the issue, and any error codes you receive. Attach and add this information to your ticket. You may also want to gather additional diagnostics on your additional polling engines and web servers.

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